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Fewer students are enrolling in computer science classes and majors
17 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: Why are fewer students enrolling in computer science majors?
What's your major? These days, you're less likely to hear computer science. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolling in computer and information science decreased this past fall from the year before. That's at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
It's the first drop since 2020. Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association says there's been a decline in a number of computing-related majors. I spoke about it with Carrie George, who's with the CRA's Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline.
We're seeing overall that declines in enrollment across computing, but that's not evenly distributed across sub-disciplines.
So we see that some areas such as computer science, software engineering, and information systems see lower enrollments where there are other sub-disciplines, namely computer engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence that are seeing stability and in some cases, a lot of growth in their enrollment as well.
What does that say to you?
I mean, I think that that says that students are shifting towards more specialized and applied computing degrees, particularly those aligned with AI security or more physical or systems-oriented computing.
What our department chairs are telling us is that students are very aware of the job market and aware of these forces with AI and the labor market, and they're trying to make choices that are going to best prepare them for life after graduation.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that. You know, a lot of tech companies have said they'll need fewer workers in the future. They'll just use artificial intelligence instead. So are students kind of hearing that and responding accordingly?
Yeah, I think that our department leaders do report that there's a fair amount of concern from students about the impact of AI on the labor market and potentially there being fewer jobs. I think that is one of the explanations they offered for why we see a decline in these software engineering enrollments. Students are aware of it. They pay attention to the headlines.
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Chapter 2: What sub-disciplines are seeing growth in computing enrollments?
Yes, absolutely. I think this is something that academic departments are contending with right now. And even in our study, we had nine academic units who recently reported starting AI majors specifically. And so they see, obviously, a lot of enrollment growth being a new major. But this is something that computing departments are contending with.
And actually at a recent CRA summit last summer, one of the sessions was about a debate of should academic departments kind of spin up these very specialized majors to kind of be a standalone major where you could get a bachelor's degree in artificial intelligence, for example, or should it be a specialization under the kind of traditional foundational curriculum of computer science?
And so I think this is something that academic leaders are currently grappling with.
And we should say there are still over 600,000 undergrads studying computer and information science in the U.S. This puts it in the top 10 majors in the country, like way above math and English and agriculture. So how serious is this shift?
I mean, computing is very ubiquitous. This is still one of the top majors at many universities. But we do know that computing as a discipline is very dynamic and very adaptable and very responsive to shifts in technology and labor markets because there's a very close relationship there. And so it's certainly something that we need to monitor as we continue to move forward.
But some of these enrollment changes may have also been intentional. We heard from several department chairs who said we actively shrunk the size of our kind of admitted students. You know, they work with their admissions committees to say, hey, we want to kind of pull back a little bit. And so I think it's something where computing is very ubiquitous.
Students know that they're going to need a fluency in computing and AI to be successful in the labor market moving forward. And so this is going to continue to be a very popular major choice moving forward, even if we're seeing current fluctuations now.
If we do have fewer people studying computer science, what could the implications be for the future?
I mean, I think the broadest implication is the impact on the potential and capacity of the workforce and also our research capacity moving forward. CRA also looks at computing pathways into graduate school and beyond and who goes into computing research.
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